UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN
Can we have some more of this, please? Maybe in April? Tavares fires OT winner in potential playoff preview,
MONTREAL— Given the potential of springtime history, you could understand the hype.
Saturday began with the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens in line to meet each other in the playoffs if the regular season would have ended Friday night. So never mind, for a moment, that the regular season won’t end for another couple of months, give or take. It was easy enough to watch Toronto’s 4-3 overtime win and ponder of the intoxicating possibilities of a Montreal-Toronto first round.
“Absolutely,” said John Tavares, the Maple Leafs centreman who beat Carey Price with a top-shelf backhand on the game-winning goal, speaking of the prospect of a Leafs-Habs best-of-seven.
Saturday was Tavares’s first game as a Maple Leaf in Montreal. It was Toronto fourth-liner Andreas Johnsson’s first game as an NHLer at the Bell Centre. For both, the experience of the NHL’s best in-arena atmosphere and the sport’s oldest rivalry more than lived up to the billing. And they did their part to deliver a performance worthy of the tradition. Tavares had the winner and an assist. Johnsson scored, too — his fourth goal in three games, a hot streak that suggests he’s due for something more than fourth-line ice time.
“These (games against Montreal) are pretty cool because there’s so much history between the two teams, foundational franchises in the NHL,” said Tavares.
Said Johnsson: “I just heard rumours … I heard it was going to be loud. And it was loud.”
The rivalry between Canada’s oldest and most venerable NHL franchises, after all, is as ancient as it gets. As in: the last time these two teams met in the playoffs was 1979. It was so long ago that when the Maple Leafs beat the Flames in the first round that year, the Flames were from Atlanta. It was so long ago that Leafs defenceman Ron Wilson was an NHL rookie whose post-series plans included returning to Providence Col- lege to coach at the summer hockey school run by the varsity coach, whose name was Lou Lamoriello.
And sure, the rivalry has waned for a lot of reasons. Between 1981 and 1998 the teams resided in opposite conferences, which meant their only opportunity to meet in the post-season would have come in the Stanley Cup final. If not for Kerry Fraser’s infamous missed call and Wayne Gretzky’s Game 7 hat trick in that memorable spring of 1993,
when the Maple Leafs came within a game of meeting Montreal in the championship series, the hockey universe would be a different place.
Which is to say, a lot has to happen for two teams to meet in the playoffs — including both teams making the playoffs, which hasn’t been a given in recent years. Montreal missed last season. The Maple Leafs missed for 10 years out of a11 before finally making it the past two seasons. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, over the past five seasons the Maple Leafs and Canadiens had met this late in a season just once with both teams still in a playoff spot. That was in 2017, when both teams made the playoffs but lost in the first round. “When we played them when I first got to Toronto, we were no good,” said Mike Babcock. “And then they had a down year last year. So we’ve never really played a good team playing good team in the season where it mattered. So tonight … obviously the crowd was fired up. The most people I’ve ever seen here in warm-up. They were ready to go tonight.”
Certainly a 2019 first-round matchup would be a role reversal from the last post-season meeting in ’79. Back then, the Canadiens were living out the tail end of one of the great runs in NHL history, en route a series sweep of the Maple Leafs that would jump-start their journey to a fourth consecutive Stanley Cup.
If Montreal was dynastic, the Maple Leafs were always verging on dysfunctional. For all the promise of an era led by talented players like Darryl Sittler, Lanny Macdonald, Borje Salming and beloved goaltender Mike Palmateer, the centrepiece of the headlines was often owner Harold Ballard, whose dissatisfaction with head coach Roger Neilson wasn’t quelled when the Maple Leafs took the final two games of the series to overtime.
“We have five of the best players in the NHL and we aren’t winning. We’re not improving. We’re getting worse,” Ballard said.
Fast forward 40 years and it was the Canadiens, at the outset of this season, that looked like the wayward organization. Fans of the Canadiens, who, if they were realists, began this season bracing for pain. Instead, the Canadiens, thanks in no small part to a rejuvenated Carey Price, have been a surprising success story.
Heading into Saturday they were one of the league’s top possession teams, ranking fourth in five-on-five Corsi percentage. A season after scoring the third-fewest goals in the NHL, the Canadiens counterintuitively traded away Max Pacioretty, the captain who’d led them in goal scoring five of the previous six seasons. They were also among 14 NHL teams averaging three goals a game. And never mind a power play that’s third-worst in the NHL; the Canadiens were 8-1-1 in their most recent 10 games. And that dormant power play? It found a way to score a goal on Saturday.
There was irony in Toronto’s win. If the season-ending goal is to meet the Canadiens in the playoffs — and to avoid Boston — a Montreal win in overtime would have arguably been the better result. Boston’s 5-4 afternoon win over the L.A. Kings moved the Bruins ahead of the Canadiens in the Atlantic Division standings, after all. But as Leafs goaltender Frederik Andersen pointed out: “We have a few games before that.” Twenty-eight more, to be exactly.
Still, as Johnsson said: “It felt like a playoff game.”
Nobody would object if that feeling returns, for real, in April.